Page:The Northern Ḥeǧâz (1926).djvu/142

 dressed in thin white shirts and fine white turbans. They were eager to know what we were buying or selling. Behind them came two other men: one dressed in trousers, one leg of which reached only to the knee, and in a vest, while the second was wearing trousers similar to our bathing drawers and a thick padded coat. They introduced themselves to me as gendarmes and requested that I should visit the commander of the garrison, under whose command were fifteen infantry soldiers of the line.

The commander was sitting in a hut which had been built north of the barracks. He greeted me very agreeably and offered me his services and help even before I had shown him my recommendations. He complained of the ruinous climate and the dreadful solitude in al-Ḫrajbe. The head commander resided at Jidda and paid no attention to the separate garrisons distributed along the coast. Once a month a ship arrived at al-Ḫrajbe from the settlement of Ẓbe’ with rice or ḏura (a kind of millet, a variety of Andropogon sorghum); once every two or three months a ship from Suez put in with flour, rice, and particularly clothing, which were exchanged for charcoal, obtained by the neighboring Arabs from sejâl, ṭarfa, and, in the highlands, from ṛaẓa. Except for these vessels, nobody came to al-Ḫrajbe for months at a time. If the garrison was relieved, it received food supplies for six to twelve months. When I mentioned that our flour was running short, the